Brocade, EMC Join for Software-Defined Storage Package

Data center network provider Brocade and storage giant EMC are adding some new functionality for systems in which they each play.

Brocade's storage-area networking management IT is now tuned and available for more than 50,000 joint EMC/Brocade customers to immediately take advantage of the virtualization benefits of EMC's new ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform for highly virtualized cloud environments.

As of Oct. 1, Brocade Network Advisor SAN management software has been integrated with the EMC ViPR platform to create a new-gen storage architecture that enables policy-based automation for managing and provisioning both EMC and non-EMC storage infrastructure using the industry-standard Storage Management Initiative (SMI) interface.

This integration will help reduce data center costs and complexity for both current and future application deployments by taking advantage of Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN solutions enhanced with its own Fabric Vision IT. Brocade Network Advisor is resold by EMC as ConnectrixManager Converged Network Edition.

As a result, EMC SAN customers can now utilize the EMC ViPR platform to use existing storage infrastructures for traditional data center workloads, as well as provision new EMC ViPR Object Data Service and EMC ViPR HDFS Service through access to Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift for next-generation workloads.

This list of capabilities can be run with EMC enterprise storage, including the VMAX, VPLEX, VNX, Atmos and Isilon product lines, as well as on commodity storage.

EMC ViPR is the world's first software-defined storage platform that is designed to manage both storage infrastructure (called the control plane) and the data stored within that infrastructure (called the data plane). It masks the complexity behind configuring and managing storage infrastructure, providing single point-and-click management for complex, heterogeneous storage functions.

Availability and pricing: The EMC ViPR platform is now available from EMC and its global network of channel partners. For pricing information, go here.